Heavy Metal: The Music And Its Culture by Deena Weinstein

Author:Deena Weinstein [Weinstein, Deena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2009-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Magazines

The history of heavy metal’s involvement with the print media generally parallels that of its relations with radio; a period of exile was followed by one of incipient connections, which was, in turn, succeeded by a period of firm and extensive linkages. In the 1970s the mainstream rock magazines mainly ignored the genre when they were not trashing it: “The response of American rock criticism to Heavy Metal in the early-mid 1970s was consistently a negative one.”95 Straw argues that one result of this treatment was the emergence of a “discourse of populism” among heavy metal musicians, who responded to the critics’ contempt by accusing them of elitism,96 thereby strengthening the proud-pariah image of metal and bonding the artists more closely to the metal subculture.

In Britain “the only major music paper to promote heavy metal was Sounds.”97 Geoff Barton, editor oi-Kerrang!, the preeminent heavy metal magazine of the 1980s, was an alumnus of Sounds. In the United States Creern did not uniformly repudiate the genre the way Rolling Stone did.98

By the early 1980s, coinciding with the new wave of British heavy metal and the growth spurt in the heavy metal audience worldwide, specialized heavy metal magazines began to appear. The oldest is Kerrang!, begun in 1981. Metal Forces and Metal Hammer started up in the middle of the decade, joined later by RAW. In the United States Aardschok America began in 1985 and RIP a year later. In addition, several long-established general rock magazines have changed format and now cover metal almost exclusively. All fourteen of the feature stories in a randomly selected Hit Parader from 1989 were about metal groups. Similarly, all of the articles in a 1986 issue of Circus were about metal bands.

Hard Rock from France, Metallion from Canada, and Heavy Rock from Spain are examples illustrating the presence of metal magazines throughout the world. Wherever metal subcultures exist, there are also metal magazines, including all of Western Europe, Japan, North America, Australia, and, more recently, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. In addition to the publications mentioned above, some of the metal magazines available in 1989 were Live-wire (Germany), Morbid (Norway), Revenge (Brazil), F.E.T.U. (Japan), and Grim Death (New Zealand). Some of the major magazines, such as Kerrang!, are read in many countries. Thus, fans are linked to one another transnationally by these magazines. The value of the worldwide metal community is promoted and achieved by this medium. The rhetoric expressing transnationalism is captured in the names of some of the periodicals. The British RAW stands for “Rock Action Worldwide,” and the subtitle of another British magazine, Metal Hammer, is “The International Hard Rock and Heavy Metal Magazine.” The latter lists its prices not only in pounds but in German deutschemarks, Italian lire, Portuguese es-cudos, Spanish pesetas, Swedish krona, Danish krona, and French francs, among others. Thus, by the late 1980s metal magazines covered the globe.

Although all media can be either mass, specialized, or somewhere in between, depending on the character of their audience, the print media more easily cater to specialized interests and audiences than do the electronic media.

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